And yet, Havana.

A poem.

Fidel in Calcutta, India, 17 September 1973.

At one hundred, Fidel sits where evening
Lowers its red flag over the bay;
A remembered cigar, no longer burning,
Lets one frail continent of ash give way.

Ash falls to the floor without proclamation –
Grey province, ruined tower, weightless state –
While prosperous clerks of the embargo
Add another lock to the iron gate.

Along the Malecón, the young assemble
Where waves interrogate the wounded stone;
The sea climbs higher, and the houses tremble,
Each balcony defending what it’s known.

The mercury rises. Bread is rationed thinner.
A fan dies turning in a fevered room.
The walls around the island rise together,
Built out of statutes, signatures, and doom.

Across the water, towers shine like answers;
Here, paint abandons walls in turquoise scales.
A doctor walks beneath exhausted windows;
A fisherman repairs inherited sails.

Freedom is a word the full pronounce
When necessity is safely out of sight;
Here freedom counts the crops, repairs the clinic,
And studies by the failing evening light.

Fidel asks for moringa, not for monuments –
A twisted pod, green medicine, plain bread;
Small leaves persist where grand designs have withered
And feed the living and tease the dead.

The century loosens softly in the salt air.
The hand that held an age begins to shake.
A pulse is but a rumour in a body.
An island is a breath the sea may take.

The heat will rise. The guarded walls will rise.
The markets will perfect their careful no.
The body fails; the stone gives way; the shoreline
Forgets the names we carved long ago.

And yet a nurse still crosses town at midnight;
A teacher prises open the school door;
And hands from which the world has taken plenty
Divide the little, making it seem more.

Twilight withdraws along the Malecón.
The clock performs its little act of harm.
Ash falls; before the dawn, a hand rebuilds;
The sea lifts Cuba in its darkened arm.